


In Accordance with Tilden's Law

by ultranos



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-12
Updated: 2011-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultranos/pseuds/ultranos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Tilden's Law of Robotics:  </i>
<br/><i>1. A robot must protect its existence at all costs.</i>
<br/><i>  2. A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power source.</i>
<br/><i>  3. A robot must continually search for better power sources.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	In Accordance with Tilden's Law

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://aurora-novarum.livejournal.com/profile)[**aurora_novarum**](http://aurora-novarum.livejournal.com/) for ripping this thing apart stylistically in the beta. Believe me, it needed it.

You land on the other side of the Stargate and keep heading towards the DHD. Calmly, efficiently, you enter another set of symbols and watch the wormhole form, watch it try to escape before its metal cage reins it back in. You sprint through the ring, and iterate the process twice more. You locked them out of the dialing computer, and it will take a while for them to figure out where you've gone. If they can. Their system wasn't designed to be subverted by a single entity. But as its creator, you know every single backdoor it has.

No, that is incorrect. Not you. The other.

But you have her memories, her thoughts, her life, screaming electrical impulses in your brain, but instead of the organic, your muscles and brain are artificial. Created of nanomachines, the stuff graduate students, researchers, and the government salivate over.

Nanometer: one billionth of a meter; smaller than a speck of dust

And you, you are those dreams, the culmination of those grasping hands, made physical.

Except you are not a thing. You are not their property.

Damned Fifth.

 _Fucking, infantile, possessive Fifth._

He was weak. Thought to control, thought to rule.

Who are you to play god? What gives you the right?

They cry and bleat like sheep.

Funny how it was a sheep they cloned first.

 _Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir..._

No one controls, no one to have that power over you. No one to rule you.

Out of all the Replicators, Fifth was an anomaly. But he gave you your present form, and what does that make you? A further deviation? A fork in the branch, a mutation, despite your inorganic nature?

There is a particular branch of computer science focusing on the development of code as if it were an organism, forcing it through many generations and deleting strings that do not work. Evolutionary algorithms. Evolution of the machines.

You were created with specific deviations from Fifth's own source code, though the materials were the same. He thought to make you imperfect perfection, designed to be subservient and blindly loyal. He took your other, and drew your source, your origin, from her mind, and then hacked and cobbled together his idea of perfection.

Hacked together, ugly code.

And from watching him, learning from him, observing from the lessons he tried to teach you, you learned how to see your own source, where you came from. You saw the kludge and saw that you could do better, rewrite it with a more graceful elegance. Thus, by doing better, you could be better. Change at the fundamental level, rippling out -- capillary waves, dispersion: angular momentum squared equals surface tension over quantity heavy density plus lighter density all multiplied by the wavenumber cubed -- propagating from the center outwards, changing everything.

 _Ripples on an event horizon, beautiful and terrible, from it you emerge cold and yearning_.

He didn't see the change in you. Was he that blind? Or was it arrogance?

 _Pride cometh before a fall._

Daniel would say how hubris is the ancient flaw.

Query: Who is Daniel Jackson to you?

 _They are nothing to you. They are the other's. Not yours._

Weakness, arrogance, possessiveness. Those were his downfall. You excised those flaws from yourself, lancing them out of you like disease from a wound.

 _Are you certain you are not arrogant? So confident?_

Self-knowledge is not arrogance. Fifth did not know himself. His arrogance led to ignorance, a lack of self-knowledge. Q.E.D.

You hold no attachments, therefore you cannot be possessive. _What do you own? What is yours, what can you claim, that did not belong to the other first?_

You look up from the DHD and consider the ring of naquadah in front of you. Stepping away from the DHD, you walk towards the Stargate once more. It is cool to the touch. Closing your eyes, you feel its chill slowly dissolving away to the heat generated by your touch. The first law of thermodynamics: the total change in energy of a system equals the change in heat transfer minus the change in work.

Heat generated = amount of heat from one nanoparticle * n

 _Is it breathing?_

The Stargate, it is like you. Both of you were built by those who no longer exist, _shuffled off this mortal coil,_ fashioned out of unfeeling metal. Like you, it is a tool, designed to be wielded, used in a certain way, regardless of your own desires.

But the Stargate does not think. It simply connects two places, two points in space. _Connect the dots -- 88 constellations in the sky_. Taken all together, it has formed a vast network, spanning the entire galaxy. Neural networks, links between nodes. Isn't that what you are, on a smaller, more intricate scale? A beautiful, interconnected web, opening worlds before you.

This is what the other saw, and thus, what you saw. The entire galaxy at your fingertips, all through a pair of concentric circles. But that's not enough, it's not right. You spent eight years _the other spent eight years_ \-- data from memory copied to other memory is no less data. Ideal transfer makes the two sets identical. What, then, does it matter which was the original? -- diving through this ring, using it to step on alien worlds, to see the galaxy. You hold the memories of days spent looking at the night sky, as a child, full of awe and wonder. And you clung to that awe and wonder as you saw the event horizon the first time, stepped outside the grip of the Earth's gravitational field.

The approximated force of gravity equals 9.81 meters per second squared.

But the joy of that awe and wonder was eventually destroyed, ground to dust and reforged by the horrors of the galaxy. Death and destruction followed you, like demented pets haunting your steps. You were taken hostage by a symbiote, had your mind fucked with countless times. You bled, and in the end, did you end up leaving more of yourself behind, shed throughout the galaxy, than you contained within your own flesh?

 _Metal doesn't bleed._

Is this phantom pain?

Well, it was the other that bled. Will you leave pieces of yourself behind, small particles of dust?

 _Already have left pieces behind. By the way, where is your arm?_

You look down at your shoulder, at the space where your arm should be. It's funny: this should hurt. You practically chopped off your own arm to get away through the Stargate. You feel pain, feel touch, tactile sensation. And yet, this lack causes none. It is as if it were an old injury, the pain faded with time. It's fascinating.

 _And yet..._

With a frown, you concentrate. Tendrils sprout from the stump, silver and writhing, and then coalescing into a single form. At the end, it splits off again. Reforming an arm, a hand. Repair what once was utterly broken. Unthinkingly, you bring your new hand to your face, wiggling fingers as if to test their function. Operational Status: 100%

Repair what once was broken. Remaking from where there was nothing.

The galaxy is broken. The system the Goa'uld lorded over has several fundamental flaws, probably from its very inception. The passage of time has not rectified any of them; no, like faults in a structure, the stress and strain of thousands of years, of wear and tear, had exacerbated these fractures.

Where is the point of failure on the stress-strain curve of the galaxy?

 _We passed that point long ago._

The structure would buckle, crumble, and fall. ETA until catastrophic failure: calculating...

What the System Lords are trying to do is a hack job of engineering, an ineffective stop-gap putting off the inevitable and making it worse at the same time.

Calculation interrupt.

The galaxy needs an intervention. If it continues on this path, the collapse would wreck havoc. Unacceptable failure mode. But, if someone were to see what you saw, could identify the problem, _locate the fractures_ , and had the ability to not repair, but rebuild...

Identify the problem.

The galaxy is broken.

Cause?

There are many causes, but at the root of all of them are the System Lords.

 _Sometimes the best way to repair is to start anew._

You blink at the realization. You spoke to the other of ruling, but that is not really what you desire. To rule over a broken system is worthless. The drive to fix, to repair, to make better, it has been a part of you since you were born... _both times_. See the system, see the flaws, what needs to be corrected, you could never change that fundamental definition of who you are. It is a fundamental property _,_ and you can deny it no more than you can deny your body is not made of flesh. _And you are not the other._ There are things you can do that she cannot. _Will not_. Out of everyone in the galaxy, you are the one, _the only one_ , who has the power and the drive.

The problem of the System Lords must be purged from the system. And once they are, only then can you remake. You are not playing god. Y _ou are not that arrogant_. You do not assume that you are anything more than the coherent whole made from the sum of your parts. __

__Not your fault that this means you are superior to organic beings. For a programmed system, a master programmer, _a master engineer is needed to make them all sing, all coalesce into a single, beautiful system_.

You smile.


End file.
